Wednesday, June 21st, 2006Good News Everyone

Good news everyone, thanks to our good friend mush we now have a sandbox to play in. This is in the SVN phases, but if you really would like to play with it I strongly sugest checking out the SVN, there is a file in there called "Sandbox.php," put it on a server that supports PHP and view the page. If you don't have a web server that you can test it out on, I'm going to give you all a little bit of a teaser I hope you all like the way it looks. Were all still working hard over here and I hope you like the work.

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Saturday, June 17th, 2006Subversion

With the addition of two devs the coding has gone crazy. So crazy in fact that we have gotten onto the SVN servers for SF.net to prevent me from dieing from all the update emails I have been getting.

If you want to look at the SVN server its at http://svn.sourceforge.net/rssatellite/

The big beinifit of this, and thus the reason it is news worthy, is that updates will be easier for everyone! If your a dev it makes updates extremely easy, and if your a 3rd party all you need to do is create a patch file and I'll add it to the code myself! Just send me an email and it will end up in the code as soon as I check it. I'm going to go back to both coding and playing with the SVN server. By the way, if you have ideas about what we should be adding to RSSAtellite please send me an email at rssatellite@gmail.com.


Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006The day that wouldn't end!

Today was the most incredible thing, I got a ton of updates both submitted and I added two myself. Here is the cumulitive change log.

*Switched away from REGISTER_GLOBALS
*Added pubDate and ttl to the output if they are present.
*It does the replacement on guid like it does with link
-This code is commented out, its up to the server to turn it on right now
*TTL now functions properly
*Hit counter is now standardized
*XHTML compliance
-Go ahead, test it!
*Added more isoHunt support

All that code didn't come from weeks of coding. One day! FREAKING AMAZING! I completed the finals I was worried about tody, and I got good scores and I got the final grades I wanted. That means I now can devote the summer to my coding. I'm running on less than fumes right now so I'm going to bed. Tomorrow, expect more changes. With all my free time though I hope people sugest features so that I will have something to do!

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Saturday, May 27th, 2006Truncate before slash

I added that feature that everyone seems to be bugging me over. Truncate before slash has been added to the v0.2 release of RSSAtellite. Not only can you truncate the stuff from the last / to the end but you can also truncate from the 2nd to last / or the 3rd -- its a loop so as long as there are /s you can keep truncating. I hope everyone enjoys this release of RSSAtellite and my server is updated, but the x70.net server hasn't been upgraded yet so hold your horses there.

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Sunday, May 5th, 2006Finaly

I finaly got around to putting the XML parser code in! Which means that the long lost feature of "truncatebeforeslash" is on its way soon!

I'm sorry for the delays between when I promised this and when it was delivered. I had the SATs and the ACTs between then and now and I'm not going to say that they didn't affect the ammount of time this took to spit out. This is just the release of the xml parser at the moment and I need to go to bed, so be on the lookout in the next few days/weeks/whenever I get around to it for the truncate before slash feature. I will have to look at the docs that I wrote up about them and refresh my memory on how that is supposed to work.

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Saturday, March 25th, 2006Spring Break!

For those of you who are looking for v0.1.x, its on its way. Today is the first day of my 9 day spring break. We can only hope that with all my spare time, and John getting his Internet setup we will be able to push out a new version of RSSatellite in relatively short order. Some of the ideas that have been floating around in our head have involved user interface design that is beyond my abilities (AJAX). Due to this I am putting out a formal request for someone who is familiar with AJAX, and regular expressions. The next step in our program is to create an AJAX editor for the find strings. Another idea that has been bobbling around for a while is caching of xml and only having it refresh every 5 min, which would lower the response time for the rendered page. Will people please send their opinions as to caching to me at achew22nosp(removenospam)am@gmail.com. John and I are also looking for someone to host the script who wouldn't mind the traffic (I can tell you that 1500 visitors brings about 16mbits of data per day so it isn't too tough of a load to bear. The problem is that John and I only have production environments that are owned by business. The problem there is obvious. I anxiously await your email!

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006This is free?! What could be better?

I have given into peer pressure and with the assistance of Mr John Gorena the short program has been ported to php!Being the decent person I am -- I have decided to share the source with the world, and all I ask is that your enjoy and give John and I a little credit. This project is in its budding stages, and we will be doing a lot of improvements in the next few weeks. Especialy now that I have someone who can breath down my neck to develop new stuff.

• The ability to shorten the querystring into a rememberable string
• Two user interfaces, one for the simple user and one for the advanced users. Of course this will be a sexy interface
• A sandbox page to view the changes side by side
• Administration settings for the site's administrators so that users don't get out of hand
• Simple integration into other torrent webistes
• Multiple themes and languages support

Monday, January 30, 2006Picking up steam

This little script hasn't picked up much steam (or so I though) so I hadn't checked the stats recently, but I'm actualy getting 5000+ hits a day! assuming people only refresh once every about half an hour (which is the default for ?Torrent) thats a little over 100 users! Thats great considering how much of a flop I thought it was. So with so many users I thought it only fair to add a little update.

OH OH OH!! Whats new?!?! Keep your pants on... or if your a girl -- send me an email! *wink wink* Not only am I good at this kind of thing -- but I'm also good at some other things!

The new feature is a "truncatebeforefinalslash" feature, or for those of us without the best eyes -- Truncate After Final Slash. Which basicly turns a url from http://www.mininova.org/tor/XXXXXX to http://www.mininova.org/tor or http://www.mininova.org/tor/XXXXX/Filenamehere to http://www.mininova.org/get/XXXXX

If the number of X's isn't the same then please ignore the extras/lack of X's.

So append &truncatebeforefinalslash=1 to your "querystring" and you should have no problems. Thanks for your support!
Also -- before you freak out that it's not working -- I'm still working on coding in some speed improvements because this was a total revamp of the code.
Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen

What is this?

This is a little script that changes files from what I like to call "stupid form" to readable and useable at least as far as µTorrent is concerned. µTorrent doesn't know how to read "stupid form" which is really a page that has a link to the torrent. Usualy the url to the "stupid form" has some SERIOUS similarities to the useable form. It's as close in some cases as a character. Or in the case of mininova.org it's the difference of this http://www.mininova.org/tor/XXXXXX vs http://www.mininova.org/get/XXXXXX.

Here is your hint -- it's not the "." after all the X's.

So if you download the file it would be something like this:

and turns it into:

Ooh! Progress, that looks like it would load in µTorrent. Exelent! That's great -- but we can't go about loading every XML feed we have and doing that (by hand at least)! That would SUCK! Remember that computers are here to help (not to serve -- remember that when we are ruled by them) so lets have them do this! I setup this page to accept querystring requests, so here is the syntax.

http://webaddressofsite/filename.php?url=URLToLoadAndParse&find=StringToFind&replace=StringToReplaceItWith

Okay, that's the syntax. And I know your lazy (based off of the fact that your too lazy to go through the listings in your browser), so I will make this even easier! All you need to remember is that this code REQUIRES that you type http:// before it. I don't want any bug repors about file not being found or something similar!

Just type the URL in for the RSS page you would like (http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml). Type in the string to find in this case "http://www.mininova.org/tor/" and in the replace feild put "http://www.mininova.org/get/" and of course all of these without "s.

While your on the page, look at the output and if it's correct then get the address and come back. If the data isn't right then come back and fix it then try again.

Were SO close now! Press Ctrl+R and instantly the RSS form shows up. Thats so cool, so fast... AMAZING. Click yourself the "Add" command button and paste your url into the textbox. Then click on the okay button. When it finishes do the normal configuring that you would do for your feed and you have a new fully functional feed! It's GREAT!

Sincerely,
~Andrew Allen